'Enticed By Felicities'

“Curiosity; and books. I think books are chiefly responsible for my doggedly self-determined efforts to write; books and verisimilitude; I like to describe things.” 

We learn by imitating, in every human endeavor from table manners to open-heart surgery. Novelty is overrated, sometimes dangerously so. Life is an apprenticeship. As a boy, when I found a book I enjoyed, I usually tried writing like the author (Thurber, Dickens, Malamud). This seemed natural, an act of envy and homage. Like Marianne Moore, I liked to describe things. To this day, I often don’t begin to understand something until I have written about it. In her essay “Subject, Predicate, Object,” published in The Christian Science Monitor on December 24, 1958, Moore celebrates precision, judging it a moral act:

 

“[W]hat simple statement, in either prose or verse, really is simple? Wariness is essential where an inaccurate word would give an impression more exact than could be given by a verifiably accurate term. One is rewarded for knowing the way and compelling a resistful un-English-speaking taxi-driver to take it when he says upon arrival—dumbfounded and gratified—‘Ah, we did not suffer any lights.’”

 

At Nige’s suggestion I am reading the English journalist Michael Wharton’s memoir The Missing Will (1984), but more about that later. Like Nige, I was surprised by one of Wharton’s parenthetical asides: “(I have always greatly disliked writing).” Under the pseudonym Peter Simple, Wharton wrote a newspaper column for almost half a century; for thirty years, four times per week – many millions of words. Wharton’s reaction is bafflingly alien to me. I have never failed to enjoy the act of arranging on the page or screen. Along with all the other pleasures associated with writing, stanching the chaos is probably supreme. Filling a small space with a precise and orderly procession of words – creating an autonomous region -- is deeply satisfying. It has always seemed like my destiny, the one thing I can do with reliable competence. Moore goes on to describe the satisfactions:

 

“It is for himself the writer writes, charmed or exasperated to participate; eluded, arrested, enticed by felicities. The result? Consolation, rapture, to be achieving a likeness of the thing visualized.”

 

And this: “Combine with charmed words certain rhythms, and the mind is helplessly haunted.”

 

My quirks are not other writers’. Moore speaks for me: “The objective is architecture, not demolition; grudges flower less well than gratitude.”        

 

[Moore’s essay can be found in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, Viking, 1986).]